Darkest Dungeon is a challenging gothic roguelike turn-based RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. Recruit, train, and lead a team of flawed heroes against unimaginable horrors, stress, disease, and the ever-encroaching dark. Can you keep your heroes together when all hope is lost?
Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based dungeon crawler where you send a party from a village hub into dungeons, with permadeath on characters you may have invested 10+ hours in. He describes it as the Dark Souls of roguelikes in terms of how brutal and devastating it can feel. He finds a recurring cycle: play, lose a favourite character, quit for a long time, then return. He respects it and comes back now and then, but finds it too brutal for his taste and places it in mid B tier.
Liked
Turn-based combat is fun and engaging
Village hub with new recruits and upgrades gives a strong progression loop
Distinctive reputation for punishing, high-stakes difficulty that some players love
Emotional attachment to characters you level up over many hours
He keeps returning to it periodically
Disliked
Heavy RNG: bosses can crit and wipe out a character, or a character randomly gets sick
Permadeath of a long-invested character feels terrible and makes him want to stop
Balance issues, even if partly intentional to feel bad
Items often have downsides as big as their upsides and feel useless, so building a character is hard beyond levels and currency
Too brutal for him personally
Tier list Part 3 (2025)
Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based dungeon crawler with permanent character death, where your roster persists across missions instead of resetting each run. He rated it B about a year and a half earlier because it felt too punishing, but after revisiting it and seeing how influential it is in the genre, he raised it sharply. He now places it in a very high A, acknowledging some would say S. What holds it back from S for him is the heavy punishment and time commitment, and he admits he has never finished it.
Liked
Permadeath of long-invested characters is a rare and bold twist on the genre, and it is the whole point of the game
Stress meter and psychological breakdowns (anxious, abusive) are unique and make you care about your characters
Boss fights feel incredibly rewarding and nerve-wracking because you can lose your favorite team, compared to early Souls boss victories
Deep strategy that rewards knowledge, roster management and swapping characters
Strong sense of adventure pushing toward the final dungeon and final boss
Fantastic tense, dark music and great art style
The narrator is iconic and makes the game very immersive
Disliked
Very punishing and hard, losing a character you have invested in to a random crit or miss stings
Combines permadeath with notable luck, which can feel rough
Requires a big time and dedication commitment to reach the end; he has not finished it
His own earlier experience was dying and wanting to quit, so it is not for the faint of heart
A gothic, Lovecraft-flavoured turn-based party RPG by Red Hook Studios where you run a roster of flawed heroes through procedurally assembled dungeons, managing both health and mental stress, with permanent death and a hamlet hub that carries progress between expeditions.
Darkest Dungeon is widely regarded as a modern classic of the genre: about 91.7% of roughly 163k Steam reviews are positive (Very Positive), Metacritic sits at 84 and OpenCritic at 84 with about 93% of critics recommending it. Critics and players praise the art, narrator, stress system and tense, consequential party tactics. The recurring complaint is that the late game turns into a grind, compounded by swingy RNG (back-to-back crits, surprise ambushes) that can wipe out heroes you spent hours levelling. It was in Steam Early Access from Jan 2015 and launched fully on 19 Jan 2016, and it is still being updated: a new DLC, The Fire's Edge, appears in current Steam data. Sequel Darkest Dungeon II (Steam appid 1940340) is a different, more run-based roguelite structure.
Players love
Distinctive gothic storybook art direction and Lovecraftian atmosphere that critics and players call hauntingly beautiful
Wayne June's narrator performance and the audio/music, repeatedly singled out as elevating every expedition
The stress/affliction system: mental health as a second resource that creates emergent story moments and meaningful risk
Tactical turn-based combat built around rank positioning, with deep hero class variety, quirks, and team synergies
High stakes and permadeath make every decision, victory, and loss feel weighty; 'easy to learn, hard to master' as one long-time player puts it
Hamlet hub progression gives persistence even when heroes die, so failure still moves the meta forward
Rewarding loot and trinket hunting, lots of bosses and dungeon variety, plus a large modding scene
Strong content additions over time (The Crimson Court, The Color of Madness, The Butcher's Circus PvP arena)
Common complaints
Late-game grind: players feel they must repeatedly farm low-level dungeons to replace fallen heroes before attempting the Darkest Dungeon itself
RNG swinginess: chains of enemy crits, missed high-accuracy attacks, and turn-order variance can undo 20 hours of progress
Hero level restrictions that bar a stronger hero from easier quests, which forces awkward roster juggling and farming
Quests are slow (20 to 60 minutes) with slow animations and back-and-forth map movement, so the game can feel like it does not respect player time
Knowledge-check design: you often learn a boss or curio mechanic only by dying to it, so many players lean on wikis and guides
Heavy economy drain from stress relief, disease cures, quirk removal, provisions and expensive final gear upgrades (for example thousands of gold per top-tier weapon, 100+ deeds mentioned by one forum poster)
Some reviewers found the stress acting-out and Crimson Curse systems annoying, and a critic cited rough mouse controls and a thin tutorial
Game does not respect player time: reviewers note most players never field a full roster of max-level heroes, and losing a few heroes means regrinding many low-level dungeons
Can feel tedious
Repeating near-identical low-level missions to level replacement heroes before high-tier content
Expensive upkeep for stress relief, curing diseases, and removing bad traits that drains gold after every trip
Slow animations and traversal that stretch each quest to 20 minutes or more
Ambushes while camping and unavoidable hallway encounters that can kill high-level heroes
Emotional toll of losing favourite heroes; some players say sessions leave them stressed rather than entertained, and the Butcher's Circus arena was not liked by at least one long-time player
What's unique
Psychological stress as a core mechanic alongside hit points, with heroes developing afflictions or virtues that can help or sabotage the party
Rank-based positioning combat in which skills work only from certain slots and move enemies and allies around
Permanent death in a persistent hamlet hub: a roguelite meta-loop of rosters and town upgrades rather than fresh runs
Torchlight and provisions management that raises tension and alters loot and enemy strength
Narrator-driven tone that comments on your successes and failures with a dark sense of humour
Hero quirks and diseases that make each recruit feel like a character rather than a disposable unit
Players want
Give end-game experience a better path, such as resolve-level XP or easier ways to level heroes, so replacing losses is less of a grind
Relax or remove the hero-too-strong-for-quest restriction so players can farm efficiently
Tune the three-tier structure to feel less padded (one forum suggestion: two tiers plus a max-level run at the Darkest Dungeon)
Reduce the randomness of ambushes, camping attacks, and crit streaks, or offer more counterplay and information beforehand
Better onboarding and in-game information so boss and curio mechanics are not pure trial-and-error; smoother mouse controls
Speed options and less tedious quest pacing (animation speed, map traversal) for respect of player time
Summarised from Steam reviews and community discussion.
Steam tags
Turn-Based CombatDark FantasyDungeon CrawlerRogue-likeRPGLovecraftianDifficultTurn-BasedSingleplayerPerma Death
Roguedex
Tier list Part 1 (2023)
Darkest Dungeon is a turn-based dungeon crawler where you send a party from a village hub into dungeons, with permadeath on characters you may have invested 10+ hours in. He describes it as the Dark Souls of roguelikes in terms of how brutal and devastating it can feel. He finds a recurring cycle: play, lose a favourite character, quit for a long time, then return. He respects it and comes back now and then, but finds it too brutal for his taste and places it in mid B tier.
Liked
Disliked